The Brooklyn Rail’s The New Social Environment is a daily artist conversation series, which is an incredibly ambitious amount of programming, but also the most natural-seeming thing in the world.
Manfredi Gioacchini’s photo of Twombly’s studio in Gaeta, a corner room with views of the bay and the city scape, but those are washed out, so look at this sculpture-like stack on the rickety table.
What’s popping out to me as I keep looking at Manfredi Gioacchini’s photos of Twombly’s Gaeta house & studio is the sculptures everywhere, and things that look like sculptures. It’s the sculpture-like objects here, the things that look like they could become Twombly sculptures, that seem to show him thinking and living with objects in a certain way, not just sitting down and making them.
a detail of the Harrod’s tin, the little things on top, img;
What got me thinking about all this was the little tower of white-painted wood box and upside-down Harrod’s biscuit box in Twombly’s corner studio. When Gioacchini photographed it, it had what I thought were paint brushes in cloths, but which turned out to be little fetish-like pouch & stick combos.
me forced to take a photo of Cy Dear on my television like a savage to show that this unfinished sculpture-like object is still there in Twombly’s studio in 2017 onward
They’re also there in Cy Dear, which was released in 2019, but shot beginning, I think, in 2017. So perhaps a sculpture left unfinished in a studio that seems left largely as it was at Twombly’s death. I had somehow figured Gioacchini’s photos were from 2009, but it makes little sense that the studio would be untouched for two years before Twombly’s death. Now it looks like a deleted tweet announcing the photos came in November 2020, so three years after the documentary, not a decade before. The unfinished sculpture was still there, still unfinished.
screenshot from Mary Jacobus’s presentation on her Twombly book, via
What jumps out at me? Well, there are additional views of the (plaster? painted terra cotta?) statue Tacita Dean photographed in Twombly’s library, which I’d wondered about in December 2023. [It’s feeling harder and harder to claim this isn’t a fanblog…]
mood lighting in Manfredi Gioacchini’s 2009 photo of Cy Twombly’s library/bedroom, via
Anyway, point is, the statue is one of three. Actually, there are more throughout Gioacchini’s photos of the house, but there are three in this library grouping. At the center, in front of the window, is a larger, dramatically unfinished twisting satyr or something. Maybe it’s leaning on an unfinished stump.
Whether they’re actually a pair, another similarly scaled male figure, with its arm raised, sits on a matching table. The contortion and billowing cloak/drapery make me think they’re connected. From the top photo, the 2023 sculpture in profile shows how deep the drapery goes, too. It would be unusual for this to be on a frieze or in a niche; these may be meant to stand free and be seen in the round. Though here Twombly has arranged them in a triptych, with his view of the bay behind.
Now that Gagosian is closing their 980 Madison Avenue space with a Twombly show, the line has gone around that it makes sense, because Gagosian always opened a new space with a Twombly show. But 980 Madison did not open with a Twombly show. It opened with a Jasper Johns show.
Jasper Johns: The Maps was Gagosian’s first show at 980 Madison Avenue. It opened 36 years ago today: February 3rd, 1989. Before that, Gagosian, sometimes called “a Los Angeles dealer” in reviews, had a space in Chelsea, at 521 West 23rd St. The first Cy Twombly exhibition at 980, Bolsena Paintings, opened in December 1989. Twombly’s exhibition history includes a show at Gagosian NY in 1986, which is not in Gagosian’s exhibition archive [indeed, none of the W 23rd St shows are.] In the three-year interim, Twombly showed new and old work with five other New York galleries.
Don’t tell me it’s not a Rachel Harrison? Wurstelprater via Christian Oldham
It eventually wore off, but for a long while after seeing my first Gabriel Orozco show, it changed me, and I saw his art in every condensation ring on every counter, and every tin can balanced on a watermelon.
Rachel Harrison’s work is the opposite, in that I’ve been looking at it for years now, and this is the first time an object in the real world has seized me with her vision. And if you want me to believe that this fake stone ticket booth at the buck wild Wurstelprater amusement park in Vienna, with the air conditioner perched on its little ledge is not the world’s largest Rachel Harrison sculpture, well, the burden is on you.
Andy Warhol, Daily News – October 19, 1983, 1983, silkscreen on metal, via @voorwerk
On the tumblr this morning, @voorwerk reblogged this odd Andy Warhol sculpture, which looks like a crumpled up tabloid page from the New York Daily News. A friend once had a Warhol sombrero made of crumpled dollar bills, so maybe there was a phase when not everything got swept into the time capsule?
Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled (paper painting), 1953, 18x14x4 in., shoe box tissue paper, glass, wood base. lost or destroyed.
The vitrine especially made me think of the lost 1950s Rauschenberg “paper painting” made of tissue liners of shoe boxes, perhaps gleaned from his window dressing era. In any case, it all seemed possible that such a thing could be a “Warhol.” But this thing is different.
The FBI’s stated Core Values are RESPECT ACCOUNTABILITY LEADERSHIP DIVERSITY COMPASSION FAIRNESS RIGOROUS OBEDIENCE TO THE CONSTITUTION, and INTEGRITY
or at least they were.
A photograph submitted to the New York Times of a Core Values word cloud at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia being repainted on January 29, 2025. Of the 595 color and finish specifications in the US Government procurement standard AMS-STD-595, 110 are commonly named gray. Until I hear otherwise, I’m going to say this is AMS-STD-595/26270, Interior Haze Gray (Semi-Gloss). image via NYT/Adam Goldman
Now I honestly can’t decide if this guy is making a subtle shoutout to fellow government worker-turned-painter George Bush, or if the new FBI Core Values is WHITE.
Either way, it’s unfortunately an early candidate for painting of the year.
A Family Tree of Modern Art in Washington, by Cornelia Noland, Washingtonian, Feb. 1967, via AAA
While researching the Pan American Union in the Archives of American Art, I stumbled across this two page spread from the 1960s, “A Family Tree of Modern Art in Washington, by Cornelia Noland.” It is a little snarky, a little petty, but quite revealing? “The modern art establishment here is, to be gentle, confused,” Noland wrote.
Diao talks with Fyfe about his explorations of painting surface and technique, his search for imagery, his critique of monochrome and abstraction, and his long engagement with the history of painting through painting.
Open up the gallery’s list and installation shots to see and identify more of the pivotal older works Diao discusses.
I’m a fan of Nicole Eisenman, I’m a fan of time between making something and showing it. And from the online preview, at least, I am a fan of these Understudies, plaster on burlap sculptures Eisenman made in 2012, which feel classic and new. I think they came from a month-long plaster-soaked residency at Studio Voltaire full of figural sculptures made onsite—and seemingly stuck there. So maybe the Understudies were the only thing that made it out.
installation view of ‘Tis but a scratch’ ‘A scratch?! Your arm’s off!’ ‘No, it isn’t’, Nicole Eisenman’s exhibition at Studio Voltaire, London, Sept-Dec 2012, photo: Andy Keate
You can’t go to the National Portrait Gallery without going to the American Art Museum, and vice versa. So after the Felix thing yesterday, I made a run through the SAAM contemporary galleries. Nam June Paik’s neon America was blinking red, and this gallery of DC artists was a great grouping.
[THE] Mary Pinchot Meyer painting in a public collection was up, next to a nice Kenneth Young, a classic Sam Gilliam, and a good Morris Louis. Behind me was a weirdly levitating Anne Truitt and a huge Alma Thomas. The way they hung a Carmen Herrera outside the gallery, but visible between the Meyer and the Thomas, was a nice touch.
Queer Ancestor: Thomas Eakins, Walt Whitman, 1891, printed 1979 [? how’d that work?] installed with FG-T at the NPG
Well that took five minutes.
The erasure or diminishment or downplaying or whatever of the gay, AIDS, and immigrant identity of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and those identity characteristics as vital context and reference in which he made his work in the 1980s and 1990s, is real and should be called out and resisted. It happened publicly and messily at the Art Institute. It happened similarly at Zwirner. It happened in subtle, coercive ways art historians and critics called “oppressive.” But addressing it’s not a question of either/or, but of both/and, as Johanna Fateman skeeted, and expanding the meaning of the work, the contexts in which it resonates, and the changes in the world around it every time it’s exhibited should build on the artist’s achievement in its original moment, not replace it.
Anyway, this debate is not advanced by the current outcry over the show at the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always To Return, because the claimed erasure is not happening. I’m not going to litigate Ignacio Darnaude’s impassioned but wrongheaded, blinkered, and inaccurate article condemning the way “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), a 1991 candy pour is presented. Its connection to AIDS is not erased. Felix’s connection to Ross is not erased. And as I walked out of the Felix galleries, past the James Baldwin and The Voices of Queer Resistance exhibition next door, and on through the permanent collection install, I have to say, there is no museum anywhere doing more of the work right now than the NPG & SAAM.
l to r: eakins’ whitman, leaves of grass, ross in la @ npg
So. Here is the way “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is presented.
Specific Objects Without Specific Form, the 2010-2011 retrospective of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work, curated by Elena Filipovic, was a pivotal influence in the posthumous reconsideration of the artist’s work and legacy. It was co-curated with three artists, Danh Vo, Carol Bove, and Tino Sehgal, in three European museums: WIELS (Brussels), the Fondation Beyeler (Basel), and MMK Frankfurt.
Frequent changes and reinstallations were the default, and each artist brought entirely different concepts for reimagining the work and its history. I would be surprised if a hundred people on earth saw every iteration and variation over the show’s 15-month run, and so the massive catalogue, published in 2016, is the primary vehicle for transmitting the experiments and experience of the exhibition.
The core of the catalogue, at least as it relates to the recontextualization of Gonzalez-Torres’ work, is a 20+ page conversation between Tino Sehgal and dealer Andrea Rosen. Rosen is the single most influential figure in the history of FG-T’s work, and the single biggest reason it’s been preserved, shown, and studied during his life, and after his death. I don’t know of any more extensive discussion of Rosen’s views on Gonzalez-Torres’ work, and the core of her message here is that it is about change.
Though there are some persistent, static objects in Gonzalez-Torres’ body of work, the most significant ones are all recreated every time they’re shown. It is the discussion and decisions that occur around each of these realizations that constitute the history of the work. Those changes, and marking them, and questioning them, and questioning the context a work is presented in each time it is realized, are, Rosen argues, central to Gonzalez-Torres’ original intention for his work.
“He would always say,” Rosen quoted Felix as saying, “‘If someone chooses to never install a work again, or manifest a manifestable work again, it may not physically exist, but it does exist, because it did exist.'” Some of his works have recently been manifest at the National Portrait Gallery, and the changes and decisions around them have prompted criticism. This has happened before, with these same works, with the same institution, even, and with some of the same people—including Rosen—stewarding Gonzalez-Torres’ work. The most public shift and criticism has been specific objections about specific identities: the seeming erasure or diminishment of the artist’s identity as a gay man, a person with AIDS, and a Cuban-American, as generative to his work. It got attention after Rosen brought David Zwirner in to co-represent the artist’s estate. But, as this show, and this book, and this interview, document it’s been underway for much longer.
Sarah Sze, Migrateurs, 1997, seemingly random stuff artfully arranged atop a European-style exit sign, collection: MoMA, a 2016 gift of John Silberman in honor of Ann Temkin
I’ve always loved Sarah Sze’s earliest works, beautiful installations seemingly made on the fly out of the most ephemeral and inconsequential materials. And I was always bummed that I didn’t get one of the sculptures she made on top of the exit signs at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris for a show she did with HUO in 1997, which I remember being surprised to see again, and up close, when one was sitting on Marianne Boesky’s credenza.
So I was rewatching Sze talking with Carol Mancusi Ungaro in 2008 about Migrateurs (1997) for the Artists Documentation Project. And they’re talking about how sticks of gum sag under the weight of carved soap sculptures, and how the green Tic Tacs have faded more than the white ones, when a collector I knew from MoMA back in the day, John Silberman, turned up on screen. It was his sculpture, and I thought, well, at least I lost it to a good home.
But then I realized it had sold at Christie’s, in the summer of 2007, in a sale I watched closely because it had the first Anne Truitt Arundel painting to come up at auction [which flew away from me], but yet I’d completely missed it, and John hadn’t. And so that made sense why he’d brought the sculpture to a conservation conversation: the Christie’s pic has the sagging gum.
Sam Francis, Untitled [archive no. SFP83-183.], 1983, 3 x 2 in, acrylic on canvas, sold at Christie’s in 2007
What else I’d completely missed? A Sam Francis painting. Now with most Sam Francis paintings, it’s a matter of ignoring them. So imagine my surprise. This Francis is 3 x 2 inches, one photo, no information beyond its authentication, so getting missed is probably a big part of its tiny history.
Ellsworth Kelly, Red on Blue, 1963, 7 x 5 in., ink on paper, via Matthew Marks, 2020
So now I’m on the lookout for a c. 1997 sortie de secours sign, which I can hot glue a tiny Sam Francis painting to. Then I can just fill in the rest with stuff from that drawer in the kitchen.
Cy Twombly exhibition poster featuring Paesaggio, 1986, via image via gagosianshop
Well, the poster for the last Twombly show in Gagosian’s 980 Madison space sold out by lunchtime of the first day, if you’re wondering how the $20 Twombly fandom’s doing.
